Last month, Samsung shared with the world some of its plans for releasing Ice Cream Sandwich updates for its existing Android hardware. Unfortunately, that meant also deciding which models wouldn’t see an update past Gingerbread. To the dissatisfaction of many owners, Samsung decided that its Galaxy S phones wouldn’t be receiving Android 4.0 updates. Upset Galaxy S users voiced their frustrations, forcing Samsung to revisit its decision. After all, Samsung pointed to TouchWiz as part of the problem, so maybe there would be a way to make the ICS update viable if Samsung dropped the custom UI. Instead, we heard that Samsung was now thinking about an Ice Cream Sandwich “value pack” of sorts, delivering certain key features while staying on what’s still essentially Gingerbread. We weren’t quite sure what to make of that unusual development, but perhaps now we might not end up getting the chance; supposedly, Samsung has decided against the value pack option as well.

According to The Next Web, it has heard from Samsung since the news of the value pack broke, and was told that the idea was up against similar limitations to those the initial ICS update plans faced. That is, Samsung still sees the Galaxy S hardware as insufficient to handle even this dialed-down value pack plan. All this back-and-forth wavering on the topic of ICS updates has us thinking that we’re not getting the whole story here, and any reasons for not wanting to bring the software to the Galaxy S are a bit more nuanced than we’re hearing about second-hand. Whatever the reason, if this is true, it’s awful news for Galaxy S owners who were hoping for an official upgrade path to Android 4.0.